24-Nov-14: Destroying their own children's lives is not the worst option for the terrorists. In their eyes, it may even be the best

Golda Meir visits a Milwaukee elementary school, 1969

[Image Source]

Khaled Abu Toameh, writing for the Gatestone Institute today, reviews the unsatisfied list of demands the jihadists of Hamas have made in the three months since the latest phase of their ongoing war with Israel segued into a ceasefire, explains why they are not going to get what they want, and predicts a bad outcome:

• The only option Hamas faces, therefore, is to attack Israel again as a way of ridding itself of the severe crisis in the Gaza Strip and the growing frustration among Palestinians living there. Hamas's biggest fear is that this frustration will be translated into disillusionment with its regime. That is why Hamas is now seeking to direct the anger on the Palestinian street toward Israel... 
• Hamas is now talking about an imminent "explosion" against Israel if the promises to rebuild Gaza are not fulfilled. Some Hamas representatives even have the audacity to hold Israel fully responsible for hindering the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip...
• Hamas's threats against Israel should be taken seriously, especially in light of reports that the movement is continuing to prepare for another war. Hamas not only continues to dig tunnels under the border with Israel [as we wrote here: "23-Nov-14: Gaza's wealth and where it is - and is not - going"]; it has also been test-firing rockets into the Mediterranean Sea...
• Hamas does not have much left to lose in another military confrontation with Israel. The killing of a few hundred more Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will allow Hamas to shift attention from its failure to rebuild the Gaza Strip to blaming Israel for "waging another war" on the Palestinians...
• Hamas is also hoping that another war will further increase anti-Israel sentiment around the world and earn the Palestinians even more sympathy.

Hamas continues to funnel jihad-centric hatred into the heads, hearts and blood stream of Gaza's children ensuring a steady stream of willing cannon fodder. Of all the options open to the Gazan regime, the one that focuses on the well-being, safety and health of their people, and especially their children, comes stone, motherless last.  Bottom of the list. Not worthy of serious consideration. 

The Hamas terrorists who murdered our beautiful daughter sought a children-rich, explicitly-Jewish target and then boasted about it on camera. So we have long felt it's right, moral and essential to remind people at every chance of how the savages of Hamas see children, even their own people's children (though not necessarily their own actual offspring, as we will explain).

Last year, we quoted the Hamas regime's Minister of the Interior, an especially loathsome individual called Fathi Hammad ["27-Jan-14: In Gaza, a death cult celebrates its graduating class"]. His theme was children. Even now, it makes our blood run cold to hear the man's words:

"Sons and brothers, you do not have much time to train. Study, conduct training, become experts and be inventive, with the help of Allah. The battle will be your battle. The Jihad will be your Jihad. Palestine is your land, Islam is your religion, and Allah is your God. The Messenger is your role model, and the Koran is your constitution. You have been planted by Allah, and therefore, you will harvest the enemies of Allah in the battle to come... We pray for Allah to choose martyrs and leaders from among you – and not only in Palestine, but throughout planet Earth, so that the call for Jihad will be spread all over the world, and the entire world will embrace the religion of Allah." 

Source

Hamad's own child needed the best possible medical care in April 2010 following a botched medical procedure in Gaza. Like other Hamas insiders, he had little hesitation in getting her across the border into an Israeli children's hospital ward. Her life was saved by the Israeli medical team. He later thanked those responsible for the act of salvation, carefully avoiding any mention of Israel. 

[For similar expressions of screw-you Hamas fat-cats, see "20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible", "18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?", "23-Apr-12: Does a people really get the leadership it deserves? Ask the Palestinian ruling class as they make their way to Israeli medical centers"]

But in the Palestinian Arab world, sociopathic views of what children are good for are not a Hamas monopoly. Consider a Fatah (not Hamas) poster that is central to a piece we wrote here a while back ["1-Feb-12: A video that reveals more about how the war against the terrorists is going than a shelf-full of analyses"]

The text [of the Fatah poster] reads: "Our children are our honor and glory. They were created to be fertilizer for the land of Palestine, and for our pure land to be saturated with their blood." [Our comment at the time:] What kind of future do youngsters raised to see themselves as fertilizer build for themselves? And who is at fault? - because someone surely is.

The Palestinian Media Watch video ["Kids are "created to be fertilizer for land of Palestine, to saturate land with their blood""] featuring the poster above is here on YouTube.

The nausea-inducing Palestinian Arab leadership's disregard of the welfare of their own people's children is hardly a new phenomenon. Most people have heard of the famous epigram attributed to the late prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, who said to the National Press Club in Washington nearly sixty years ago: Peace will come only when the Arabs love their children more than they hate ours. Too true then, even more strikingly true today.

So many decades; so little advancement.

8-Oct-13: Children and their indispensable role in the conflict

The Commentator

In a series of events that have gotten almost no media attention outside our own land, two Palestinian Arab brothers, Alaa and Fares Adawi, aged 25 and 26, residents of El Bireh (population about forty thousand) a few kilometers north of Jerusalem, were apprehended last night by IDF soldiers.

The men are being charged with involvement in the near-fatal attack on a nine-year old child, Noam Glick, in the nearby Jewish community of Psagot. JTA reports that the two men live "several hundred yards from the girl’s home" and that "the IDF found a knife smeared with blood from the victim... near the scene of the attack".

Noam was attacked on Saturday night after Psagot's protective fence had been breached earlier in the day. The little girl suffered injuries to the neck and after emergency care at Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center is, thank Heavens, recovering well. The community of some 320 families was obliged by the authorities to remain in security lock-down until dawn on Sunday morning while searches for the perpetrators continued. A report in Algemeiner says Psagot has known no previous attack of this nature.

There's considerable attention being paid in the media to which Arab figures did and did not condemn that attack on a 9-year-old child playing in her family's yard. Mahmoud Abbas, president of the PA and head of the Fatah terrorist organization, is said to have failed to condemn or criticize it, but then mentioned it in a technically negative way in a meeting with Israeli parliamentarians yesterday ("We oppose, on principle, aggression against anyone..." etc.). Jibril Rajoub, an especially loathsome public figure in Palestinian Arab affairs about whom we have had cause to write several times (on May 9, 2013, and on July 26, 2012 among others), did condemn and in fact pointed to those who in his view are responsible: he meant the Israelis (naturally). An official Facebook page of the Fatah terrorist organization praised the attacker and predicted, or perhaps more accurately hoped, he or she would soon strike again. 

The pro-Israel media's concern about condemnations and whether or not they were made misses the point. Noam, thankfully, will live to talk about her oh-so-close encounter with the lethal hatefulness of the Palestinian Arab terrorists. 

Others (we include ourselves in that category) have been much less fortunate. 

We know that those mealy-mouthed "condemnations" mechanically trotted out by public figures in the Arab world and in many parts of the media in the wake of some (though certainly not all) terrorist attacks are, for the most part, shabby camouflage, mere lies. To see them as the true, sincere views of the people expressing them is folly, given what we know about the culture in which lethally toxic, personal terrorism is actively nurtured as a worthy and heroic pursuit. 

And we know a lot, even if serious observers and the mainstream media choose to politely (and disingenuously) look the other way so as not to see.

There's no need to look further than the officially sanctioned summer camps of the two Palestinian Arab statelets - those of Abbas' PA and of the Moslem Brotherhood's Hamas - to see the naked hypocrisy that underlies the empty expressions of sympathy for terror's victims and the condemnation of the terrorists themselves. We have talked about this here many times including:

• 3-Jul-13: Educating the next generation: an early-summer reflection on asymmetry
• 18-Jun-13: They want their children to become killers and they say why. The rest of us are left with questions
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and Jibril Rajoub notwithstanding, we say it's self-deluding to think that the fatal grip terrorism has had on three generations of Palestinian Arab juveniles is the work of the Palestinian Arabs alone. They are aided and abetted by the silence and/or the active enabling encouragement of multiple high profile international agencies. 

These include UNICEF, Defence for Children International, UNESCO, Child Rights International Network, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Washington-based Jerusalem Fund, the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, Save the Children Sweden, Arab Council for Childhood Development and several other child-focused NGOs. 

The silence of those bodies in the face of the decades of abuse of Palestinian Arab children, nurtured and prodded into becoming gunmen, stabbers, human shields and the hurlers of firebombs and explosives, makes them irrefutably complicit. It matters not one tiny bit whether they choose to condemn the outcomes or to ignore them.

Over at the website of The Commentator, its chief editor Robin Shepherd has expressed bluntly how the crown jewel of the UK's foreign policy (referring to that incomparably vast and rich media empire known as the BBC) fits into this grotesquerie. His short essay, published yesterday afternoon in the wake of the attempted murder of little Noam Glick, is entitled "It's not BBC bias against Israel; it's hate".

From an earlier blog post

If a 9 year old Palestinian girl had been shot by Israel, and the government had gloried in it, this would be headline news, worldwide. The BBC is shameless in its bigotry
Some readers may have little daughters of nine, younger or older. Regardless, you have the capacity for empathy? Palestinian children count just as much as any other. They suffer under the currents of history, in our view mainly due to their own leaders.
But no matter, a child is child. Unless she's an Israeli Jew, the BBC and most of the Western media appears to believe. We will keep this brief, but it is truly shocking and disgusting. As we reported here, a nine year old girl was shot by a Palestinian sniper while the supposedly "moderate" Palestinian Authority circulated on Facebook a celebration of the would-be child murderer, thus:
"The sniper of Palestine was here. He saluted Hebron, and rested in El-Bireh. He left the signature of [real] men in different parts of the homeland. He saluted and left, and moved on to a different place, with a new signature, as he tells the stories of those who love the homeland." If Israel had sent a sniper to kill a little Palestinian girl that on its own would have been major international news. If the Israeli Cabinet had gloried in it, this would have been top news for days or weeks on end. A UN resolution would not have been out of the question. BBC headline? Not at all. Since she's a 9 year old Israeli Jew, no-one cares. The BBC isn't biased. It's possessed with hate. And since they know this story - from us and others - there can really be no other conclusion than that. Or do you have a better explanation? Journalistic integrity just ain't one of them... [The Commentator, October 7, 2013]

Golda Meir, a legendary figure in Israel's first four decades, famously articulated the blend of deep regret and utter determination that Israelis feel when confronting the realities of the society that continues to evolve so disturbingly on the other side of our fence. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington nearly sixty years ago, she said: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Most Israelis understand that we are not only not there yet; it's highly doubtful we are even on that road.

Golda also said - less famously, but no less incisively: "Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself." That's an idea that continues to inspire us.

28-Sep-06: Terrorism? Child's Play

In his excellent "Letter from Israel" blog, David Frankfurter points out the unwanted consequences of uncritical, unaudited and uncontrolled European material aid to the Palestinian Arabs. David writes today that:

Materials captured by the IDF in Lebanon reveal that the Palestinians have finally found a successful export product. Indeed, one created by a home grown industry nurtured and encouraged by European taxpayer funded aid monies. Hezbollah has learned from the Palestinians the value of hate material aimed at children. It uses colouring and picture/story books to instill the virtue of killing Jews and joining the "resistance" at an early age. Here (at right) is an example. A few crayons will add colour to Hezbollah soldiers crossing the border, abducting Israeli soldiers. The Funding for Peace Coalition and Palestinian Media Watch have long documented the way internationally funded budgets of official Palestinian Authority institutions were used to ensure that education to terror starts early. The headline in this morning's Israeli Yediot Aharonot newspaper announces the reward the Palestinians are receiving for this knowledge and skills transfer: "Hizbollah is preparing Hamas for a battle with Israel in Gaza."

What Palestinian Arab society has done, with eyes wide open over a period of generations, to its own children is both a crime and its own punishment - a crime and a punishment of historical proportions.

As parents of a child actually, physically (not nearly, not virtually) murdered by the pathological savages created by that enterprise, we feel the need to endlessly remind people of the powerful truth contained in the words of a wise old woman. Golda Meir famously said: "We'll have peace with the Arabs when they learn to love their own children more than they hate us."

It hasn't happened. And as important resources like Teach Kids Peace show, it does not look like happening anytime soon.